A stroll through Leach Botanical Garden

Last week our local weather people started throwing around warnings that the BIG WET was about to start; "just two more dry days"... "this is the last dry day before." They love to get all alarmist, it's not like there aren't dry days in this week's forecast. Still, I am not one to waste an opportunity to be outdoors while the weather is good, so I decided to visit Leach Botanical Garden in SE Portland.

The containers by the entrance were all sorts of fun.

And the gravel sitting area just inside the entrance looked like something pulled from a big fancy Botanical Garden, not a garden near a kinda sketchy neighborhood in SE Portland.

My last visit to this garden was in 2022, that was after the big redo and I wasn't completely onboard with the changes (pre redo visits that I wrote about were in 2015 and 2010). This time the changes felt better, probably both becasue they'd had time to mature and I wasn't seeing them for the first time.

The first section that you walk through is the pollinator garden. While it's not my thing per se, I still enjoyed it. It's wonderful to be completely emersed in plants.

There are a few stylized art benches in the garden, the addition of pumpkins made it all feel grounded in the season.

Normally I wouldn't have given a second thought to the tall conifers that surround this garden, but after the 2024 Fling up in the Puget Sound area and hearing people from other parts of the country in awe over our tall conifers, well, now I notice them.

They call that building the Arbor, but really I was more interested in the tree fern. It was labeled as Balantidium antarcticum, but better known as Dicksonia antarctica.

There was more pollinator garden to investigate before walking through the "Arbor"...

Some sort of Persicaria I believe.

I couldn't find a label for this random stem, but appreciated it's color.

The "Arbor" from it's backside.

Another Dicksonia antarctica.

And a Wollemia nobilis...

I stood on my tip toes to get a shot of the cones.

Looking through the covered "Arbor" and out at the fireside terrace with its fire pit and stone benches.

There were containers on the far side of the benches, the plantings interesting.

Astrolepis sinuata

What a darling mushroom.

The elevated tree walk loops around, beginning and ending at the fireside terrace.

Of course I walked the loop and enjoyed looking down on another walkway and a border of Tetrapanax papyrifer.

The Leach home visible from the tree walk. The garden is on land that Lila and John Leach owned for years, their home built in 1936 (more on the history of the garden here).

In a bit we'll be down on that narrow path behind the house, where I'll complain once again about how under planted the excellent rock garden is.

Walking through the wild part of the garden...

And now down by that rock garden. Why aren't there more interesting plants in there!?

I did find one lonely agave, there used to be a dozen or so.

Down on the lower level now, the home and the rock garden both visible.

I adore this wall and fountain.

There's another lower level below the home, it borders Johnson Creek, that's where I am now. The yellow leaves belong to Haiesia monticola 'Rosea' and the apricot leaves were labeled as Oxydendrum arboreum, although the shape seems slightly off from what I would expect from that plant.

The same trees from a different vantage point.

Nice mass planting of Woodwardia unigemmata.

A sign put out by the garden staff? Or perhaps an anonymous fan of the mollusks... 

The home and gift-shop from the opposite side of the earlier photo. Time to climb those stairs up, up, up to the top level where I started this journey.

Along the way I had to stop and appreciate the Arctostaphylos manzanita ssp. laevigata. This manzanita and I go way back, it's one of the first I admired here in Portland.

Maybe Salvia guaranitica 'Black and Blue'? I'm not much of a salvia gal, but I love those dark calyx.

Anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’

I'm back up at the pollinator garden level now, and don't remember these dried seed heads from my earlier walk through.

Oh and what's this? Yep, an off limits staff-only area. Okay time to leave before I'm stopped for questioning.

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All material © 2009-2025 by Loree L Bohl. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited and just plain rude.

I wish I knew where to get a low-cost sheet of metal

Cutting back the contents of the driveway crop tanks (vegetables in one and flower stems grown for vases in the other) I got to thinking how nice it would be to use one of them as a taboret, a table or bench on which to display some of my containers over the winter. They're right by our backdoor and where I park—a highly visible spot. 

(photo from Sept 13th, before cutback and the Great Migration, it doesn't look like this now)

Something along the lines of how I use this metal bench...

(also from Sept 13th)

I found myself thinking, "I wish I knew somewhere I could get an inexpensive piece of metal I could put over the top of the stock tank." Gosh, where would I get something like that!? Duh... maybe where I've purchased most of the metal pieces I'm already using around the garden? 

(also from Sept 13th)

Off to the BBC Steel scrapyard I went. Here's what I came home with...

Because I didn't want to risk rusty stains on the tank's galvanized metal I purchased a section of plastic tubing at a hardware store and cut it to fit over the rim of the tank wherever the two metals made contact.

Like this...

I liked the Russelia equisetiformis (firecracker plant) planted in the tank and it spent last winter in the same place (except for few days we had below freezing, when I pulled it and protected it), so I left it and worked the metal pieces around it. I covered the soil with moss I picked up on a recent adventure into the wilderness.

It's much nicer to see fuzzy green than brown soil.

Then it was time to bring in some container plantings...

What luck this container slipped right into one of the cut-outs.

I decided to fill this display space with my Aeonium collection. A few years ago Daniel Sparler encouraged me to let these winter-growing succulents stay outdoors on all but the coldest days (he details that approach here) and my plants have responded favorably to that treatment.

Having them right by the back door will make it easy to grab them if temperatures dip. 

I put this particular planting together early last July, using some 2" "plant poppers" (Aeonium arboreum 'Velour' and A. hybrid 'Kiwi') from Little Prince of Oregon Nursery. They've exploded in size...

Being a plant shadow connoisseur I'm loving the patterns these plants make on the side of the house.

The Aeonium aren't the only plants that have moved into this area, see that large plant on the far right?

It's Nerium oleander ‘Hardy Red’ and I got it (and its nice terracotta pot) from Jerry at our last Garden Blogger's plant swap. The Xera Plants listing says: "Full, HOT sun in a protected location. Best against a south or west facing wall- out of subfreezing east wind." That's exactly where it is here, in a corner that faces both south and west. Obviously a plant in a container loses a Hardiness Zone though, so I might end up schlepping it elsewhere if we get a cold snap.

I'm having a lot of fun with this area, and keep making changes, adding and subtracting things.

 Those changes aren't the only ones I've done in the drive though, I also replaced the plants and containers on the front of the garage.

It's a seasonal thing, the metal (they're clamp-on lamp shades) has excellent drainage and can withstand a freeze, where as the pottery that hangs there in the warm months will crack if the soil freezes and expands (ask me how I know).

These Mangaves aren't the hardiest choice for planting, but I had them kicking around (gifts from the grower) and I figured why not try them?

If temperatures really plummet I can always pull them and put them somewhere warmer for a few days.

So... that's my latest change-up here.

Next up, we need to put the walls up on the Shade Pavilion Greenhouse. But that's a task for another day...

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All material © 2009-2025 by Loree L Bohl. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited and just plain rude.